A year ago we had a blog post 8 Tips to Protect Your Domain Registration giving some simple tips to domain name registrants. These tips could be applied wherever your domain is registered. If you have a domain name and it is very important to you  I strongly urge you to read the post mentioned above and make sure the contact email for your domain  is correct. You can check this by logging into your account or by checking our WHOIS service.

The contact email address is very important as most renewal notices are sent to that address. In my digital life I have had several email addresses until I finally settled for an email in my own name. The lesson is to make sure the contact email address is the one that you use regularly.
To avoid the hassle of remembering to renew every year I would suggest setting any auto renew options your registrar may have. Now a word of caution each  time you get a new credit card with a new expiry date  is updated too. This means you need to go into your account and update your credit card on record.

To recap here is what I am recommending you do:

a) Check your domain name registration email address and make sure it is accurate
b) Set your domain name to auto renew
c) Keep your credit card details updated.

I would also suggest setting up a annual calendar reminder to check your domain registration, or any other annual fee. So today is my “Check My Domain Name Registration” day. Why not make it yours too.

You may have other tips that you use for online services, please post them here or send me a guest post.

The fact is, there are several big reasons that marketers need to revisit the importance of the domain name in their strategy. Here are a few points that many businesses have forgotten about domain names:

1. The domain name should come first. When planning a new tagline or strategy, consider the domain name early in your process. This is not to suggest that every good tagline should be thrown out when a domain is not available … but consider who has the domain registered and be realistic about how important it is to your strategy to have it. People WILL search for you based on the most logical domain name. f it’s gone and you can’t get it, maybe it’s time to rethink the strategy.
2. Domain names aren’t gone forever. Remember those “domain troll” companies that registered thousands of domain names in the early 2000s in the hopes of selling them for megabucks? Well they are all out of business now and their archives of domain names they gobbled up on five year deals are now expiring and coming on sale.
3. People can’t spell. They never could before, but with the rise of spellchecks and a new generation without the necessity to spell correctly (and finding a new lexicon for text messages), registering only a single spelling of a domain name could be a recipe for disaster. Make sure you register the common misspellings of your domain name, otherwise you risk being victimized by the “typosquatters.” These are the people who register your common misspellings to siphon off your traffic and potentially mislead your customers.
4. Alternative TLDs do matter. As Internet users get more familiar with domain names online, the use of other domains beyond “.com” will continue to rise. Keeping an eye on additional Top Level Domains (TLDs) added and what is available in your domain name will be well worthwhile. Though I couldn’t get www.influentialmarketing.com registered, I do now own the .biz, .info, and .org versions of it. Perhaps I can convince Ropers to let me have the .com version some day … and in the meantime, I will have to make do with my “official” registered URL for my blog www.influentialmarketingblog.com.
5. Domain names are the ultimate search marketing tool. As anyone who has studied search engines or professes to be a Search marketing expert will tell you, a good domain name that mentions certain keywords will go a long way to helping your site appear on search engines for the right searches. And the best part of all? You may be able to avoid paying for those keyword ads on Google and invest that money elsewhere.

So these things lead to five very simple rules you can follow to get smarter about your domain name strategy:

1. Register domain names early in your business planning.
2. Set up email alerts to let you know when domain names with certain keyword combinations become available https://www.networksolutions.com/manage-it/keyword-login.jsp and bid on soon to be expired domain names, or names that may be up for sale.
3. Register common misspellings, and use Google’s keyword tool to research a list of common misspellings
4. Register other TLDs for your chosen URLs.
5. Consider registering common keywords as part of your URL or as part of alternatives for your URL so you can attract search traffic for those keywords.

Any other tips you have about domain names and how best to use them for marketing. Email me at rohitaustralia@gmail.com and let me know!

Rohit Bhargava  is author of the anticipated new marketing book, Personality Not Included  and an award winning blogger at Influential Marketing Blog .He is also a founding member of the Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence team, a part of one of the largest marketing and communications agency groups in the world.